“And each from each shall learn, as he predicts
His neighbour's ills, that he
Shares in the same and harbours them, and speaks,
Poor wretch, of cures that fail.”
Footnote 511:
At a more advanced period of human thought, Cicero (_Orat. pro
Roscio_, c. 24) could point to the “thoughts that accuse each other,”
the horror and remorse of the criminal, as the true Erinnyes, the
“assiduæ domesticæque Furiæ.” Æschylos clings to the mythical
symbolism as indispensable for the preservation of the truth which it
shadowed forth.
Footnote 512:
Once again we have the poet of constitutional conservatism keeping the
_via media_ between Peisistratos and Pericles.
Footnote 513:
The Tyrrhenian trumpet, with its bent and twisted tube, retained its
proverbial pre-eminence from the days of Æschylos and Sophocles
(_Aias_, 17) to those of Virgil (_Æn._, viii. 526).
Footnote 514:
The fondness of the Athenians for litigation, and the large share
which every citizen took in the administration of justice, would
probably make the scene which follows, with all its technicalities,
the part of the play into which they would most enter.
Footnote 515:
It was necessary that some one, sitting as President of the Court,
should formally open the pleadings, by calling on this side or that to
begin. Here Athena takes that office on herself, and calls on the
Erinnyes.
Footnote 516:
The technicalities of the Areopagos are still kept up. The three
points on which the Erinnyes, as prosecutors, lay stress are: (1) the
fact of the murder; (2) the mode; (3) the motive. “Three bouts,” as
referring to the rule of the arena, that three struggles for the
mastery should be decisive.
Footnote 517:
The pleas put in by the Erinnyes as prosecutors are: (1) That
Clytæmnestra had been adequately punished by her death, while Orestes
was still alive; and (2) when asked why they had not intervened to
bring about that punishment, that the relationship between husband and
wife was less close than that between mother and son. They drew, in
other words, a distinction between consanguinity and affinity, and
upon this the rest of the discussion turns. Orestes, and Apollo as his
counsel, on the other hand, meet this with the rejoinder, that there
is no blood-relationship between the mother and her offspring.
Footnote 518:
_Sc._ Their oath to give a verdict according to the evidence must
yield to the higher obligation of following the Divine will rather
than the letter of the law.
Footnote 519:
To have died in health by the arrows of a woman-warrior might have
been borne. To be slain by a wife treacherously in his bath was to
endure a far worse outrage.
Footnote 520:
In this new argument, and the answer to it, we may trace, as in the
_Prometheus_ and the _Agamemnon_, the struggles of the questioning
intellect against the more startling elements of the popular religious
belief. Zeus is worshipped as the supreme Lord, yet His dominion seems
founded on might as opposed to goodness, on the unrighteous expulsion
of another. Here, in Apollo's answer, there is a glimmer of a possible
reconciliation. The old and the new, the sovereignty of Cronos and
that of Zeus may be reconciled, and one supreme God be “all in all.”
Footnote 521:
Comp. the thought and language of the _Suppliants_, v. 93.
Footnote 522:
The last argument is, that the acquittal can be, at the best, partial
only, not complete; formal, not real. There would remain for ever the
pollution which would exclude Orestes from the _Phratria_, the
clan-brotherhood, by which, as by a sacramental bond, all the members
were held together.
Footnote 523:
The question seems to have been one of those which occupied men's
minds in their first gropings towards the mysteries of man's physical
life, and both popular metaphors and primary impressions were in
favour of the hypothesis here maintained. Euripides (_Orest._, v. 534)
puts the same argument into the mouth of Orestes.
Footnote 524:
The story of Athena's birth, full-grown, from the head of Zeus, is
next referred to as the leading case bearing on the point at issue.
Footnote 525:
Here, of course, the political interest of the whole drama reached its
highest point. What seems comparatively flat to us must, to the
thousands who sat as spectators, have been fraught with the most
intense excitement, showing itself in shouts of applause, or audible
tokens of clamorous dissent. The rivalry of Whigs and Tories over
Addison's _Cato_, the sensation produced in times of Papal aggression
by the king's answer to Pandulph in _King John_, presents analogies
which are worth remembering.
Footnote 526:
The story ran that the tribe of women warriors from the Caucasos, or
the Thermodon, known by this name, had invaded Attica under Oreithyia,
when Theseus was king, to revenge the wrongs he had done them, and to
recover her sister Hippolyta. Ares, the God of Thrakians, Skythians,
and nearly all the wilder barbaric tribes, was their special deity;
and when they occupied the hill which rose over against the Acropolis,
they sacrificed to him, and so it gained the name of the _Areopagos_,
or “hill of Ares.”
Footnote 527:
As in the _Agamemnon_ (v. 1010), so here we find the aristocratic
conservative poet showing his colours, protesting against the
admission to the Archonship, and therefore to the Areopagos, of men of
low birth or in undignified employments.
Footnote 528:
The words, like all political clap-trap, are somewhat vague; but, as
understood at the time, the “lawless” policy alluded to was that of
Pericles and Ephialtes, who sought to deface and to diminish the
jurisdiction of the Areopagos, and the “tyrannical,” that which had
crushed the independence of Athens under Peisistratos. Between the two
was the conservative party, of which Kimon had been the leader.
Footnote 529:
The Skythians may be named simply as representing all barbarous,
non-Hellenic races; but they appear, about this time, wild and nomadic
as their life was, to have impressed the minds of the Greeks somewhat
in the same way as the Germans did the minds of the Romans in the time
of Tacitus. Tales floated from travellers' lips of their wisdom and
their happiness—of sages like Zamolxis and Aristarchos, who rivalled
those of Hellas—of the Hyperborei, in the far north, who enjoyed a
perpetual and unequalled blessedness.—Comp. _Libation-Pourers_, v.
366.
Footnote 530:
Two topics of praise are briefly touched on: (1) the lower, popular
courts of justice at Athens might be open to the suspicion of
corruption, but no breath of slander had ever tainted the fame of the
Areopagos; (2) it met by night, keeping its watch, that the citizens
might sleep in peace.
Footnote 531:
The first of the twelve jurymen rises and drops his voting-ballot into
one of the urns, and is followed by another at the end of each of the
short two-line speeches in the dialogue that follows. The two urns of
acquittal and condemnation stand in front of them. The plan of voting
with different coloured balls (black and white) in the same urn, was a
later usage.
Footnote 532:
Compare note on v. 419.
Footnote 533:
In the legend of Admetos son of Pheres, and king of Pheræ in
Thessalia, Apollo is represented as having first given wine to the
Destinies, and then persuaded them to allow Admetos, whenever the hour
of death should come, to be redeemed from Hades, if father, or mother,
or wife were willing to die for him. The self-surrender of his wife,
Alkestis, for this purpose, forms the subject of the noblest of the
tragedies of Euripides.
Footnote 534:
Partly as setting at nought the power of Erinnyes and the Destinies,
partly as giving wine to those whose libations were wineless.—Comp.
Sophocles, _Œd. Col._ v. 100.
Footnote 535:
The practice of the Areopagos is accurately reproduced. When the votes
of the judges were equal a casting vote was given in favour of the
accused, and was known as that of Athena.
Footnote 536: